Dog and I

by Roy MacGregor

  There was once a time when Canadians were hypersensitive about their dominant season. In the late nineteenth century, British prime minister William Gladstone dismissed us as the land of “perpetual ice and snow,” and the Irish newspaper, The Nation, ridiculed the place so many Irish were headed for as nothing less than “a kind of Siberia.”

  At one point, long before political correctness worried about the inadvertent mention of “Christmas,” the Canadian government, in its infinite wisdom, ordered that the word “cold” be avoided in all government brochures and publications and be replaced with the far more acceptable word “buoyant.” If I were to say to the neighbour, “Buoyant out today, eh?” I would get a look like the dog gives me when I tell her it’s time to head back inside.

  There was another point when Canadians actually tried to pretend we had no white stuff to speak of here during the “winter” months. When railway magnate William Van Horne used to head off to Europe in search of new investors for his railways and new immigrants to ride them west, he would fake a chill no matter what city he might be in, moaning for all to hear, “How I pine for Winnipeg to thaw me!” I understand he was in Florence the day he said this.

  Mercifully, Canadians eventually came to celebrate winter, even trying to sell it to the rest of the world as something that was, indeed, buoyant to the spirit.

  Few of us care for so much of it, and almost all of us will be begging, come late February, for it to finally stop snowing, but at the moment it is most welcome. For reasons that no one can understand—any more than we can figure out why the snow the plow deposits at the end of the drive is 2,426 times as dense as the fluff The Dog and I are supposed to be shovelling—that first snowfall seems to warm us up as much as it, most assuredly, brightens the evening enough that a flashlight isn’t necessary.

  Bandit understands this best. The snow seems to have taken a half-century of dog years off her, and she runs as if she would love to be, if it were only possible, both under the snow and on top of it at the same time. What she smells in that fresh snow is unknown; it is, however, delightful to see that nose poking, for once, in a place where I would happily poke my own.

  The driveway done, the old dog and I head out for a walk down past the houses and under a roadway to a park where an open creek still churns and defies icing solid, at least for a few more weeks. The scene is sweeter than any of the politically correct holiday-time-of-year cards that have been filling up the mailbox each morning. Deep snow covers the deer trails, falls off into the creek, and flows like slush floes down past the beaver chews and, eventually, into the Ottawa River.

  Around one turn the dog suddenly starts, frightened by five mallards that burst from the creek and, in a fury of duck talk and slapping wings, head out over the cornfields on a bearing that will take them south. Perhaps they stayed around just long enough to see winter’s exquisite arrival. Perhaps they have already seen enough.

  Grizzled and on the Lam

  It is always disconcerting to discover that the voice at the other end of the telephone line belongs to the police. And all the more so to learn that they are calling about one of yours.

  “We have your dog here at the station.”

  For a long moment I am speechless, and the Ontario Provincial Police constable mistakes the silence for denial. He recites the numbers of a licence, but they mean nothing. I have never heard those numbers before. Nor, of course, have I ever looked at them.

  “It’s registered in your name, sir.”

  I’m sure it is—but still I am speechless.

  “Female. Black and brown with a little white, fairly small—is that yours, sir?”

  It certainly sounds like her, but how? Bumps is nearly fourteen years old and has not only never before crossed the law, but these days can barely cross the lawn. It would seem more reasonable if the police were calling about one of the kids being caught in a bank holdup, or if our aging Ford Pinto station wagon had turned itself in as a menace to public safety. But we are speaking here of the totally harmless, a mongrel that came from up a street we lived on in Toronto it seems now so very, very long ago.

  She was a puppy back then and came to the door in a wagon pulled by neighbourhood kids trying to unload an unwanted litter, and we took one in one of those weak moments that seem to follow puppies around like paper towels. The vet was diplomatic. “I wouldn’t expect much if I were you.” We did not and were pleasantly surprised. If anything the dog was too dependable.

  All dogs are special, but there is something very special about the dog that grows most with your children. It is not about type, but about time—and Bumps’s time happily coincided with the time of our own litter: four children, three girls and a boy, spaced out over a mere six years. The first arrived when Bumps was three, and the dog handled the newborn coming home from the hospital far better than any of the children who followed did of the children who followed them. A dog of endless patience—with the peculiar exception of preferring that a child not grab her luxuriant tail—and a dog committed, almost obsessively, to ensuring that none of them, like wayward lambs, ever strayed very far, whether from the backyard or from the shallow end of the dock.

  Like everyone’s dog, this one had certain special traits—including a strange ability to remove peanuts from the shell and a penchant for ripe raspberries plucked fresh from the bush—but still, just a dog.

  After fourteen years, you take them for granted. No one ever notices that the puppy who was once gagging on the end of a leash has not broken away on her own for more than a decade. Everyone else seems to grow after a while, but not the dog. The dog never changes. Or at least you hope. Others, over time, start to see things a bit differently. The vet looks at the old dog and mentions a grizzled mouth or cloudy eyes, but you see only the pup who first came knocking at the door. But then, one day, you are forced to acknowledge what time, curse its hide, has done to your pup.

  For this particular dog, it happened recently on a long walk through the woods to an abandoned farm the kids are convinced they can buy and fix up for less than forty cents. Halfway in, the dog lay down panting and simply refused to move. The only way to get her across the mile or so still to cover was to carry her like a baby, which of course I did.

  When we reached the farmhouse I carried her inside in search of shade, unfortunately walking straight into a large porcupine coming down the gutted stairwell. Porcupine and person both panicked, but all the dog did was turn slightly in my arms, bark twice, and growl, baring teeth the vet says are desperately in need of scaling. The porcupine also ran for the door but the person, fortunately, won, still carrying the dog like a baby. As I bolted over the broken doors, she tucked her head under my arm and snarled back as if she, somehow, was the one with the porcupine on the run. Perhaps from her perspective it seemed that way. After all, her legs never moved and the porcupine did indeed fade quickly into the distance. The dog had obviously won the day.

  Against the porcupine, but not against time. Not against the one enemy that won’t be halted by a nasty snarl and the baring of old teeth.

  Following that collapse in the woods, it was clear that no one expected much any more. Everyone agreed that fourteen years was a long time—ninety-eight, the more mathematical kids said, in dog years—and from that moment on she was treated as if her glory days were forever gone. After that sad day in the woods, no one even suggested another walk.

  “Sir?” It was the voice on the telephone again. The OPP officer. The police calling about the dog.

  “Yes—yes, the dog’s mine, all right. I’ll be right down.”

  I drove down and parked behind the station. She was sitting at the back near the garage doors, two young officers sitting with her, both with a hand ruffling up and down her back.

  “She’s never run away before?” the younger officer asked.

  “Never.”

  “Well, we found her running along the road up there. Shaking like a leaf.”

  “Never seen a dog so n
ervous,” the other officer said. “I wonder what got into her?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  But later, watching her dance in the seat on the way home, I did know. It wasn’t nervousness, but excitement. And what got into her was what should get into us all when they write us off before our time.

  You Will Know When It’s Time

  “You will know when it’s time.”

  Fine, but how? There is no expiry date on her that I can find, nothing at all to indicate shelf life apart from the obvious fact that she was clearly “best before” any of this current state of affairs came along. There is no timely reminder in the mail, no message on the answering machine, no waiter discreetly laying her plastic credit card on the table and whispering that it is no longer considered “active.” She would take offence to that. She thinks herself very active indeed. Mercifully, she does not see herself as we have lately seen her.

  It is fall now, and this is approximately the sixth time since May that we have come here to the lake together so that Bandit can spend her final days where she has always been happiest. Over those few months, the changes have been dramatic.

  I now carry Bandit to the car, place her in a back seat specifically set up so she cannot fall off and get stuck anywhere—and yet several times each drive I will have to stop and adjust her. One time it will be her back legs stuck between seat and door; another time she will be wedged head first between back seat and front seat.

  It is foolish for me to be embarrassed for her. She never says a thing about any of this. Of course, it has been a year now since she last barked. Hard to believe, that, since it was always her wild, excited barking that announced we were here, the way others on the lake might hoist a flag.

  What is totally mysterious is how this old dog, who cannot see, who cannot hear, still manages to wobble to her four feet when the car turns onto the long country road that leads in here, and how the panting that would have been described as “laboured” only hours earlier is now almost puppylike.

  “You will know when it’s time.” They all say that. And surely, I thought when we headed out, this will be it. There is a shovel leaning against the cabin. There is a special place chosen, back up in the bush by a huge rock that this mutt could once bound onto in a single leap. Now, however, she needs to be carried from the cabin down the three small steps to a flat bit of ground where she awkwardly does the required business and then needs carrying back up again. I do this happily.

  I used to be baffled by stories such as the one about legendary hockey coach Roger Neilson pushing his old mutt around in a shopping cart because the dog could no longer walk and Roger simply could not do what needed to be done. But now I understand.

  Fifteen years ago, when this mutt was a puppy, we bought a cage that resembled a shopping cart without wheels. The idea was to place the dog in it when we went out. The first time we did go out after the arrival of this old dog as a puppy, we came home and found all four kids inside the cage with the puppy happily bouncing off it as she tried to get at them. They just didn’t want to deal with her frenetic energy. Now they have to deal with her lack of energy and are also happy to carry her up and down the steps, more than willing to pick her up when she falls. It’s nothing, absolutely nothing, compared with what we all owe her.

  The end of a pet is one of the great curiosities of society. Within the family walls, it is devastating. One step beyond those walls it means little. Two steps beyond those walls, it means nothing.

  I never expected her to last this long. She wouldn’t make the May 24th weekend … she wouldn’t make Canada Day … she wouldn’t make Labour Day … and now we say she won’t make Thanksgiving. But summer did not come to this part of the country until early fall— just as the sixties didn’t reach Canada until some time in the early seventies—and so here she still is, still sniffing around the pine needles, still heading instinctively down toward the water. Only with such a difference. Whereas once it was full bore down the hill and off the end of the dock, now it might be slipping and rolling down the hill and falling in.

  It helps to remember that this old dog called Bandit— now so skinny, now so helpless—was once the talk of the lake as she was known to swim entirely across it if she heard children swimming, the only sight her barking black and white head and the wake from the powerful strokes that were taking her to the far shore to round up kids.

  “You will know when it’s time.”

  I suppose this is true enough. We knew when it was time the last time this situation had to be faced. And the time before that. It’s never nice, but one day it simply becomes time.

  The lake is remarkably calm, unlike the man standing at the end of the dock wondering what to do, and when to do it. The old dog is at the steps, determined. She locks the back legs that no longer seem to work and hops once, slipping but holding, hops again and is down on her own, blindly heading into a world of a thousand nasal delights. There is, perhaps unintentionally, also a slight bounce to her step. And perhaps the man at the end of the dock misreads it. But so what?

  It is not time yet. Not yet.

  Walking Alone

  I am having to learn to walk all over again.

  Don’t misunderstand. I did not break a leg. There is no apparent brain malfunction, despite all those years of covering hockey. I am learning to walk alone, and it is not an easy thing to do. There is no longer a dog around here to walk me (yes, it was finally “time”; enough said, please), and yet I remain one of those people who must, absolutely must, get out each day and work off excess energy.

  Writing is a most unusual lifestyle in that you tend to run a marathon each day from the bellybutton up, but do next to nothing from the butt down. For balance— we’re talking health here, not journalism—you need to get out and get mobile, whether on a bike or on your own two feet, in whatever fashion they prefer to move. And the beauty of having a dog, even a very old dog, is that the dog gets you out no matter what the weather, no matter what the mood.

  For nearly sixteen years Bandit walked me. And for sixteen years before Bandit came along, Bumps walked me. Dogs, in fact, have been walking me since I was eleven years old and a family down by the river was handing out mutts that were still hanging off their one mother but looked as though they had several dozen fathers. So it has been only in these past few weeks that I have realized I cannot walk alone.

  When I head down the street and over the crosswalk toward the park we always walked in, I now think every driver passing by figures I have a heart condition. I am out here, walking, under doctor’s orders. Or perhaps I am something never before seen in this suburban neighbourhood—a middle-aged man without a car—and am therefore immediately under suspicion.

  It has all brought home the fact that we are defined by the company we keep. There is not a man alive who has ever pushed a stroller and not noted how, miraculously, women coming in the other direction no longer avoid eye contact but smile widely at you. And there is not a dog walker born who has not benefited from the doubt that is erased in the minds of all he passes. If the dog is friendly— and all of ours have been tail-wagging, crotch-nuzzling, face-licking basket cases—then the owner is automatically presumed friendly as well, and the strangers will nod and say hello and often even stop to pat a head until they are so soaked in saliva they must head off in search of towels.

  I would always end this old dog’s walk with a shortcut that brought us back alongside a schoolyard. If we came at noon or recess, we would be instantly surrounded.

  “Can I pet your dog?”

  We would wait, patiently, while every kid who wished to reach out and touch a big, friendly, panting dog could do so. Often a teacher, or a parent helper, would also come over, always smiling, always delighted to see the friendly dog make its slow way across the field.

  But none of this works while walking alone. I walk down the street and no one says hello, no one smiles. We breeze by each other as if neither even exists. If I were to dare to walk
slowly, and alone, across this same schoolyard at recess, there would probably be alarms sounding.

  I have tried other solutions. The eldest daughter is, frankly, getting quite annoyed at being asked if she’d like to go for a walk. She makes jokes about getting the leash and making sure one of us carries a plastic bag, just in case. I have been watching other lone walkers and notice that some of them use props. One man, for example, heads into those same woods each day with a camera. I used to think it was to photograph the wildflowers or the fresh-fallen snow, which it is, but I suspect now it is also so that no one will presume he is up to no good.

  I briefly considered walking one of the four cats— please don’t ask how they ended up here—but if you cannot herd cats then surely they are also unwalkable. In good weather, of course, there is always the bicycle, and no one ever questions a lone rider. And once the snow falls and stays, there are cross-country skis to throw over a shoulder and snowshoes to tuck under an arm, even if one has no intention of ever using them. But at this time of year it is too cold for biking, too early for skiing, and often too icy and slushy for running, so there is really nothing to do each day but head out in the dying light and walk.

  Alone. A suspicious character, up to no good. Someone who had better find another dog soon to walk him.

  Dog Wonder

  It had been a mild January. The sun felt like March, the wind like October, and yet the snow, knee-deep, was as white as it had been in the old days, before washed-out colour photography began tinting fresh-fallen snow blue and even yellow.

  You could not help but notice this snow as it, too, had to do with unusual weather patterns for this part of the country. First there had been an ice storm, then a melt, then a great overnight dump of snow that stuck, like candy floss, to everything damp that it touched. Even hydro lines and eyebrows.